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upstart writes:

The computer's accuracy improved as scientists used more qubits to fix mistakes:

To shrink error rates in quantum computers, sometimes more is better. More qubits, that is.

The quantum bits, or qubits, that make up a quantum computer are prone to mistakes that could render a calculation useless if not corrected. To reduce that error rate, scientists aim to build a computer that can correct its own errors. Such a machine would combine the powers of multiple fallible qubits into one improved qubit, called a "logical qubit," that can be used to make calculations.

Scientists now have demonstrated a key milestone in quantum error correction. Scaling up the number of qubits in a logical qubit can make it less error-prone, researchers at Google report February 22 in Nature.

[...] The new advance doesn't mean researchers are ready to build a fully error-corrected quantum computer, "however, it does demonstrate that it is indeed possible, that error correction fundamentally works," physicist Julian Kelly of Google Quantum AI said in a news briefing February 21.

[...] That small improvement suggests scientists are finally tiptoeing into the regime where error correction can begin to squelch errors by scaling up. "It's a major goal to achieve," says physicist Andreas Wallraff of ETH Zurich, who was not involved with the research.

However, the result is only on the cusp of showing that error correction improves as scientists scale up. A computer simulation of the quantum computer's performance suggests that, if the logical qubit's size were increased even more, its error rate would actually get worse. Additional improvement to the original faulty qubits will be needed to enable scientists to really capitalize on the benefits of error correction.

Still, milestones in quantum computation are so difficult to achieve that they're treated like pole jumping, Wallraff says. You just aim to barely clear the bar.

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